DGB Performance In 2016 vs 2015

2016 was another great year for this website. I work hard to ensure that there is enough decent content on here that I hope is useful, insightful and generally worth taking a few minutes out of your day to read. My analysis of DGB’s stats is proof to me that my hard work pays off. It’s also shows me in which areas I need to improve upon.

So, as promised, this is my DGB 2016 vs 2015 performance review. Some may question as to why I bother to publish this sort of thing. I do it for two reasons. Firstly, for the sake of transparency and honesty. There’s not enough of it I believe. Secondly, it stops others second guessing how the site is doing. By publishing my accurately measured stats, people can see exactly from the horse’s mouth how DGB has been doing.

Performance

Rather than give you the main information points in drab text, I’ve put together a funky infographic of the major points of note. So here you go:

DGB 2016 vs 2015: The Major Metrics
Create your own infographics

All in all, growth in all the right areas.

Review

The two you would expect I am most happy with are the big jumps in Visitors and Unique Visitors. At the start of 2016 I perhaps would have been happy at steady growth of five to ten percent. But to see Visitor growth over 19% and Unique Visitor Growth over 27%, I am very pleased with how the site performed on those metrics.

Near the end of the year I was starting to get a bit twitchy as to whether I would beat 2015’s Page View numbers. I did in the end, and it would have been nice to break through the 200k barrier for the second time. Has it happens I got very close, but no cigar. Growth is growth however, and I plan on working hard to increase the amount of page views per visit so as to make sure I break through 200k this time round.

Another metric I am pleased about is the average amount of time spent on site per visit on DGB. In 2015 it was 2min 6sec. In 2016 it rose over 50% to 3min 11sec. It’s not in the top three metrics to measure, however, it is nice to see that those who do visit DGB are spending more and more time reading what is published.

For the first time I have also published the amount of visits that have been driven to DGB via social media, and which platforms have worked the best. The clear winner as you can see from the chart above is Twitter with almost three quarters of the traffic. However what I am pleased with is the numbers from Facebook. It’s now the second most used driver of traffic to DGB, pipping LinkedIn. I have been on LinkedIn much longer than I have had DGB on Facebook. In fact I really only started to push DGB on Facebook during the middle of last year. So to see it second already is great insight. This is where data works really well. I know that to help boost traffic to DGB over the coming year I know to use Facebook as one of those drivers, thanks to it’s rapid rise.

Google+ traffic is exactly where I would expect. I am not sure how long Google can expect to keep this going as a social network of any guise. It’s probably time to can it. I’ll continue to publish DGB content on there, just in case anyone stumbling on it finds it interesting. But I’m not banking on it giving me much traffic at all in 2017.

2017 targets

In an earlier post I touched upon the things I want to achieve with DGB this year. You can view that post here. But after this full review, I can take a closer look at what I need to do to ensure that DGB becomes bigger, better and useful to us all.

These are some targets I have set myself for 2017:

achieve 170,000 visitors
achieve 130,000 unique visitors
reach 225,000 page views
boost social media driven visits to 30,000
reach 10,000 Twitter followers – 11,000 as a bonus target
reach 2000 DGB subscribers by the year end
200 “Likes” for DGB Facebook page

The first three are my key goals. The rest are the things I need to boost in order to achieve those top three targets. It would of course be nice to tick all 7 of those targets off before the end of the year. But I am realistic, the full seven is highly unlikely. To be honest, as long as the top three metrics are all higher than that of 2016 I will be happy. Obviously the higher the better. But if I could reach all three top targets then that would be a great sign of the progress DGB is making within the industry.

I am also going to become more aggressive this year in getting to these goals. I have a range of new ideas to expand the site and what I can do over the coming year. The most imminent idea is DGB Jobs. More about that via a new post shortly. There will be ideas and things not yet done by anyone else, and there will be new DGB ideas that challenge some already existing services. I will do all I can to ensure that DGB grows and grows well during the course of this year.

So, all in all, a pretty positive 2016 for this site. A number of new platforms have made themselves aware in which I intend to exploit to grow it further. And with the FIT Show, Brexit, Europe elections, the November Budget and a whole host of other glazing industry related issues, there is going to be plenty for me to tackle during the next 12 months!